In 1619 a Dutch ship arrived on the shores of the British colony known as Jamestown, Virginia. Aboard were nineteen African slaves. Those nineteen individuals, taken against their will, were the first to suffer from a four hundred year long, and counting, human-made catastrophe. It was then that American slavery began, which quickly evolved to the societal racism we see today. Today’s post is written to show that bad luck had nothing to do with that ship arriving on the Virginian shore.
David Olusoga (2015) states, “Ideas of Africans as inferior, backwards, and barbaric can be traced back to those justifying slavery in the 18th century. And the stereotypes still cast a shadow over the continent”. Olusoga continues his point when referring to the 18th-century slave owner, Edward Long. Long is notorious for writing the book History of Jamaica, which was the most damaging published text for racial ideas to ever exist. With his lack of scientific training and extreme eurocentrism, Long wrote a very influential book on why and how Africans are inferior and possibly not even human. Regardless of lacking any scientific evidence to back his claim, his book was widely accepted and published throughout Europe.
To make matters worse, Long was not alone. Books, novels, articles, you name it, were being published all throughout the world with the commonality of spreading this awful opinion as truth. And it wasn’t just the “bad guys”. Thomas Jefferson is a shining example of one of our founding fathers with misguided intentions. In Jefferson’s analysis of people of color, he finds that they are biologically conditioned for manual labor since they lack the intelligence and beauty of white people. He follows by stating how they are also “tolerant of heat” and are simply better designed to work a physically demanding job with little thinking involved (Fields, 1990). His thoughts were then shared with the world to help create a country. A country built to favor white people and provide their “biologically deserved” jobs. When black people were left to work jobs where their “tolerance to heat” came in handy.
As already stated by Olusoga, these forms of influence were published for one reason and one reason only, to justify slavery and colonialism. With the turn of the 15th century, the dominant European powers learned about the millions of people and acres of land that could be theirs, all they had to do was grab it. Being technologically superior, there was little to nothing Africans and Native Americans could do to stop these European invaders. Even countries as small as Belgium were able to colonize all the Congo and strip it of its land and people. Therefore, the issue of colonizing land and people was not external, but instead internal.
The European leaders needed to find a way that their citizens would be on board for the slaughter and enslavement of millions of people. They needed a justification for their actions, one that was more than simple greed and the desire for power. They needed to be seen as leaders doing it both for themselves, but also for the people they were colonizing. And that is exactly what they did.
Before long, writers like Long and Jefferson began to dominate the public consciousness. It created the idea that non-Europeans were inferior to the human race. And it was their duty, as Europeans, to conquer these people and teach them their ways.
This technique has proven to work century after century. King Leopold II ruled Belgium and committed the single largest genocide known to mankind. His army killed up to ten million Congolese and enslaved the rest. In justifying his actions, he stated that Belgium was of a superior race who deserved land and wealth from the inferior Congolese.
Sound familiar? Hitler gave quite a similar speech. In justifying the slaughter of nine million people, Hitler explained that Germany was a superior race, who deserved to rule to world. We can also look at Manifest Destiny. The United States deserved the land it took over and that it was their given right. As a last example, we see this with mass incarceration today, especially in the United States. These prisoners broke the law and therefore deserve to be imprisoned.
In all these examples, nobody thinks to question the people who decide what is or is not deserved. My question is why do 360,000 people right now deserve to give up time in their life for stealing things of financial value, rather than simply paying it back plus some? Another question I have is why did seven million people deserve to be arrested from 2001 to 2010 for marijuana when eleven states currently have the drug legalized? I believe that sometimes we need to question whether people really deserve the things that happen to them.
There is nothing natural about racism. It was socially constructed to justify the barbaric and inhumane actions of the European leaders during the age of colonialism. And unfortunately, the has been working since the moment those nineteen human beings began their lifetime work in Jamestown. We need to look past this thousand-year-old method and try to see the world in a new way. One that is interpreted by how you think, not how society wants you to think. The next post will touch on implicit bias in order to see just how deeply rooted this construct is within us all.
The Whole Series is Now Available:
Bridging Our Understanding of Racism (Part 1)
How Unnatural Racism Is (Part 3)
Implicit Racism, the Racism you Never Knew About (Part 4)
Just How Present is Racism? (Part 6)
It’s Time to Take Action Against Racism (Part 7)
Work Cited
Editors, History.com. “Slavery in America.” History.com, A&E Television Networks, 12 Nov. 2009, www.history.com/topics/black-history/slavery.
Fields, Barbara. “Slavery, Race and Ideology in the United States of America.” New Left Review (1990): 95-118.
Jefferson, Thomas. “The Difference is Fixed in Nature.” Notes on Virginia (1785): 95-103.
Sawyer, Wendy, and Peter Wagner. “Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2019.” Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2019 | Prison Policy Initiative, 2019, www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2019.html.
Olusoga, David. “The Roots of European Racism Lie in the Slave Trade, Colonialism – and Edward Long | David Olusoga.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 8 Sept. 2015, www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/sep/08/european-racism-africa-slavery.